Veteran takes on Tokyo establishment

Shadow shogun, scandal-tainted party boss, insider turned rebel, a leader who can say no to Washington –
Ichiro Ozawa
has been called many things in 40 years of politics.

Now, as Ozawa, the former head of Japan’s governing Democratic Party and its widely acknowledged powerbroker, begins what might be the final manoeuvre in a turbulent career, he is proving as powerful and divisive a figure as ever.

Ozawa, 68, announced on August 26 he would challenge the prime minister,
Naoto Kan
, to become the party’s president, and thus prime minister. He vowed to restore the party to its original promise of building a more accountable political system able to lead Japan out of its current drift.

“Last year’s election victory was about creating politics run by elected politicians," Ozawa said in announcing his bid. “If this attempt should fail, full-fledged democracy will never take root in Japan."

The internal party vote, to be held on Tuesday, now appears too close to call, with some predicting it could end up splitting the party. Ozawa’s bid was greeted with surprise and even incredulity by many in Japan, where he has been portrayed in the major news media as a corrupt, Rasputin-like figure.

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However, there is another side to Ozawa. He is widely credited with using his considerable, if perhaps unsavoury, political skills to engineer the Democrats’ landslide victory last year, which ended more than 50 years of virtual one-party leadership by the Liberal Democrats and seemed to usher in a more competitive democracy.

But the Democrats’ drive to open up Japan’s political system has stalled, prompting a question: is Ozawa the forceful and capable leader so hungrily sought by citizens of this ailing economic giant, which has suffered too many colourless, short-lived and altogether forgettable prime ministers?

In a debate with Kan this month, Ozawa blamed the party’s lack of direction for the Democrats’ poor showing in mid-term elections two months ago. He also accused Kan of being under the thumb of the nation’s elite central ministries, which have long run Japan and whose powers the Democrats had vowed to curtail.

Kan, a former civic activist who has excluded Ozawa and allies from his three-month-old government, said Japan must move beyond the machine-style politics represented by Ozawa, who was forced to step down as party secretary-general in June partly because of a series of political financing scandals.

Ozawa was a rising star in the Liberal Democratic Party, and a protege of party bosses such as Kakuei Tanaka, the original shadow shogun. Then, in 1993, after the party refused to enact electoral reforms he championed, Ozawa and his allies bolted, helping create a short-lived opposition government.

After that coalition unravelled, Ozawa spent years trying to build an alternative party. Yet he achieved this by borrowing liberally from the Liberal Democrats’ own playbook. During last year’s election, he prised away formerly diehard LDP supporters such as doctors and farmers with promises of generous handouts. Ozawa has also shared the LDP’s penchant for creating factions, surrounding himself with a group of some 150 mostly novice Democratic lawmakers , dubbed “Ozawa’s children".

Contradictions have helped make Ozawa an enigmatic figure, even among Japanese. His utterances range from tortuously convoluted to the gruffly ineloquent. Fellow Democrats call him gifted and ambitious, but with a nasty tendency to steamroll even supporters who disagree with him.

If he wins, one question will be how he handles Tokyo’s crucial security relationship with Washington, its long-time protector. He has called for Japan to become a “normal nation" that can speak its mind to the United States and also take a more assertive role overseas.

But those who know him say Ozawa’s real goal is to challenge not Washington but the powerful bureaucrats at the central ministries. This has led to bitter clashes with Japan’s permanent government, including the public prosecutors, who have pursued numerous investigations into his political finances in recent years.

While Ozawa has promised to co-operate with prosecutors if he becomes prime minister, he has also criticised them as being politically motivated. The fact that prosecutors have never charged Ozawa with a crime, and they have also failed to pursue leading Liberal Democratic lawmakers who have also been implicated in campaign finance scandals, has led many Japanese to agree with him.